The Art Of Giving

By far my favorite films, after those combining time travel with love, are murder mystery comedies. The double feature I most foist upon my friends are Murder By Death and its admirer, Clue.

[I love watching films in pairs. My Netflix queue is constantly being fine tuned so that I have a double feature ready. For example, in September I created "Female Monarchs In Distress", combining The Queen with Marie Antoinette.]

A friend who watched my Murder Mystery Double Feature suggested I check out some other Maggie Smith murder mysteries, Death On The Nile and Evil Under The Sun. I threw in Murder On The Orient Express for good measure.

Each has its charms, and annoyances.

Death is slow, and long. David Niven provides some comedic relief at the beginning, but it is offset by Angela Landsbury's not-quite-funny drunk sexpot performance, and an annoying native caricature of an Egyptian ship captain with an inexplicably Indian accent. And one of the main characters is written as a FREAK, it's a relief when she's finally shot in the head. Unfortunately, this happens only 5 minutes before the 2+ hours film is over. Yet there are several pleasures. Bette Davis. Maggie Smith. David Niven. Peter Ustinov. And a suspenseful, dialogue-free visual trip through the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt. The closeness of the gigantic stone columns is used to great cinematic effect: as the camera pans between characters, they are all seen observing one another, all guilty, all distant, all hiding from one another, but in visual contact with the camera, and the murder victim.

Murder is slightly less slow, and a few minutes shorter. Albert Finney plays Poirot, and his portrayal is much more precise and studied than Peter Ustinov. He manages to make Poirot more affected, yet more believable at the same time because of his flashes of passion and deep anger. He is a pleasure to watch, offsetting the fact that most of the film takes place in a train that isn't moving. Also offsetting this stillness in scenery is the sophisticated intercutting of newspaper articles and flashbacks to another location. There is also a mesmerizingly brilliant performance by Ingrid Bergman. Yet like Death the characters seem like caricatures, even placeholders that the actors speak words for so the murder plot can be complex. The effect is that I would get restless whenever anyone except Finney or Bergman were on screen, no matter how much I loved the actor.

Evil was my favorite of the three. It is the shortest, most concise, and funniest. It also uses its location to maximum effect. It also uses Maggie Smith to maximum effect: she is by turns funny, sexy, and catty. Roddy McDowell plays a flaming queen that surely tops lists of hilarious flaming queen portrayals in film. The other characters are just as flat and underdevelopped as any of Agatha Christie's characters, yet unlike Death and Murder they are portrayed as intentionally comic, and as such they are far more watchable. Instead of wishing the film would just move on to the next character, I found myself wishing for more Maggie Smith, and all the rest.

One more thing. Evil also has the virtue of using songs and incidental music by Cole Porter. The songs all appear to be from Anything Goes (my favorite musical). The gem was a piece of "You're The Top," a song that never ceases to amaze me at the power of Cole Porter's prowess with clever rhyme. Some of the lyrics they sang were ones that I had not heard before:

You're the topYou're a new inventionYou're the topYou're the fourth dimension

I'm a frog without a log on which to hop!But if baby I'm the bottomYou're the top!

Several things have happened since the two week period where I suddenly moved to Astoria, Queens (reprezent) and started BJJ, May 15-June 2 2007. They're all very interesting and important, and I'm sure you already know all about them.

The only one I haven't been able to put my finger on is what the hell was going on to me around my dating, relating, and masturbating situation. I have been on two dates since the summer and have had little enthusiasm for any at all. I have lost one hundred percent interest in random sexual encounters, which, you may be surprised to learn, I used to find some pleasure in. I don't even really whack off any more: it's like cooking a five course meal for one. What's the point if you can't share?

My first impulse was to connect all this to my new crowd of acquaintances, the guys and gals at my school. They are the people I see most every week, with the possible exception of the people I share my office space with. Yet this connection was not clear to me, so I figured it was a bad guess, that I was making patterns where there were none, and I left it at that.

It occurred to me today, as I walked Kimble and prepared for the, oh, twelfth straight Sunday in a row where I would be home co-chillaxin with K-dog, with a potential jaunt to the gym, after having spent Saturday night watching a movie at home and going to bed around 10.30, tired from my JJ class that day, after having spent a Friday night at home reading The Economist and retiring at 10.30, tired from my JJ class that evening. It occurred to me that I have radically replaced the type of casual relationships I have in my life (be kind, I'm slow). I have been practicing for months at being with people, partners, working in close physical contact, connected in all the ways possible except for the sexual. Close acquaintanceship. The last time I grew close to a straight guy was CC, and he was hired before he was my friend; before that, graduate school 10 years ago. I have switched worlds. Before, my acquaintances were all potential lays/loves. Now, potential close friendships are developing, and I am having to practice doing that one layer by itself. But I'm not going to read into it here, this is one bud that is still blooming.

I can't sit through horror movies. I'm too squeamish. When I was in college, Alien was on television every sunday for a month, at about 1pm on the bright sunny fall days we were having. I could only get about thirty minutes into it before I would have to just stop watching. I've gotten a bit better as the years go on, but I still avert my eyes whenever something gruesome comes on screen.

Strange as it may sound, I have a very peculiar exception to my allergy: the horror-comedy. Evil Dead and the like. Add to this Shaun Of The Dead. With its visual puns on zombies (much stumbling and lurching and vacant expressions and mindless hunger goes on in daily living, yo), the movie is hilarious enough. Add to it the poking fun of middle class habits in suburban London (and the masterful ensemble cast, including the cute Simon Pegg), and you've got a black comedy in the vein of The Ladykillers or The Lavender Hill Mob.

1. 16th century conquistador searching for the tree of life and totally finding it.2. Present-day wife dying and giving you all sorts of life-changing one-liners.3. 25th century space biosphere with tree of life and one man.

Okay, number 3 is my favorite. Although I have a soft spot for crazy tricked out spaceship action, I am always deeply moved by science fiction that eliminates the fantasy technology altogether. Everything looks normal. You could shoot the piece in your living room, or at the airport, or on the sidewalk. In this case, a tree and all its roots are in a transparent sphere, zipping through space. Okay, you can't shoot that in the living room.

At any rate, it seems a civilized way to travel between stars. This device is in service of concentrating on the psychological effects of technology, and entirely sidesteps the mistake of making a fetish out of made-up technology from the future. I think. See La Jetee for another example (which is my favorite film ever). Perhaps it's merely a way to describe the effects of love over time: by amplifying the time-slipping effects using the unique sequencing power of cinema.

I agree with many of the reviews of this film that said the characters
had a limited emotional range (although I thought Hugh Jackman and Rachael Weisz were amazing with what they had to work with). I wasn't focused on the character shallowness during the film,
so I can only assume it wasn't important to the director. I took the movie as one story, the characters as all the same person. I didn't take them to literally be moving through time, just two people who are conscious of how we all slip back, and forth, through time throughout our days, and our nights. In fact, it is sometimes difficult to determine what part of now we inhabit.

Like every undertaking I take on, I have created a game for myself with BJJ. I set a long-term goal, I make up milestones for along the way, and from there figure out actions necessary to accomplish everything. I get off on the planning as much as I do the execution. I look two years out. If the milestone seems possible and comfortable, it is too easy, and must be rejected. The milestones must appear scary and near-impossible crazy talk.

Almost as enjoyable is the execution, which never, ever looks like the plan.

Specifically, when I began JJ I created the game of making blue belt in 14 months. This task usually takes a couple of years of concentrated training, so this goal seems frighteningly impossible. Therefore, it is perfectly suited to my game. I have a whole schedule of accomplishments for every month until late fall 2008. Because of the compressed schedule, every JJ class is an important day. I have no time to lose, so I get my head in the game before I do the bow and step onto the mat. Habit (the death of on-my-feet thinking) are assiduously noticed and avoided. I take crazy care of my body, so I can keep training intensely.

As I said, the reality is generally not to plan. (Fucking reality, so not to plan.) And to make it more interesting, the plan itself is undergoing constant revision, because what I thought were the best actions to take sometimes turn out to be nothing like what is really required. Case in point are private lessons, which are exactly what I need to advance more quickly, yet of which I had not even conceived of until my teacher invited me to take them.

Sometimes, I accomplish milestones I didn't think to create. I never really knew much about the BJJ belt system, or in particular our school's system. In addition to the standard BJJ colored belt system, our school uses stripes. Three stripes are possible at your belt level, and the next step up is the next color belt. This system is completely not important to my training ("this no count in Jiu Jitsu"), yet it is a way for the teacher to mark my progress. And so, after four and a half months of work, I was surprised to see my name on the list of people getting a stripe on their white belt. After the promotion ceremony I will be a one-stripe white belt. Woo-Hoo! Can I have a martial arts movie contract now?, I joke with my friends.

But secretly, and I'll share this only with you, I'm thrilled. It is an unexpected milestone. The best form accomplishment: the one I am not concerned about, yet love anyway.

I sing songs with made up lyrics when I'm home, alone. I don't have a television, so this is how I entertain myself. Oh boy, is that a Depression-era story or what? More on that in another post. At any rate, often times I just repeat sassy pofanity to the latest Beyonce or Britney song and then laugh at how hilarious I am.

The lyrics that aren't profane are about Kimble!. Just now I made up lyrics, to the tune of "Mary Had A Little Lamb". Kimble! had jumped on my lap after being all dry and fluffy and fresh smelling from his bath tonight, and I burst out into

I love Kimble, I love Kimble,
I love Kimble, I love Kimble!
I love Kimble, I love Kimble,
I love Kimble, Kimble, Kimble!

It was so automatic I didn't even know what tune I was singing it to. Brilliant, that.

Some of the lyrics are riffs on the real lyrics. To the tune of "Mickey". It came because I sometimes call Kimble "Licky" because he licks my hands and legs a lot:

OH KIMBLE YOU'RE SO FINE, YOU'RE SO FINE YOU BLOW MY MIND HEY KIMBLE! HEY KIMBLE!
[sometimes I have Kimble clap his paws together for the handclap part]
Oh Licky what a pity you don't understand
You take me by the heart when you lick me on the hand
Oh Licky what a pity you don't understand
It's dogs like you Licky!